"Giving in to hate is like drinking salt water. The thirst only gets worse." — Parks & Recreation

Kevin McCarthy’s Benghazi clustermuck gets worse: The likely next speaker is a man out of his depth – Salon.com

Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy kicked himself in the teeth earlier this week when he went on national television and uttered a truth that was supposed to remain unspoken: the House Select Committee on Benghazi exists to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes. He appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program and boasted that the committee’s work had damaged the previously “unbeatable” Clinton, and said that Republicans could expect more of the same under his speakership.The comments drew intense blowback from Democrats and Republicans alike. The Democrats rightly took them as confirmation that the Benghazi committee is a politicized farce that uses taxpayer resources to achieve explicitly partisan goals. Republicans were mad at McCarthy for making it impossible to maintain any level of plausible deniability regarding the committee’s true purpose, and urgently demanded that he put the toothpaste back into the tube.So McCarthy went back on Fox News last night to explain that he didn’t actually mean to say the thing that he said: